Time to ban divorce and adultery… and masturbation

I’m serious. It’s high time we started fighting back against the far-right and their religious coup against our democracy. And I think the way to do it is to give them what they want, and watch the American people freak out.

First off:

1. A constitutional amendment banning divorce.

2. A federal law making adultery a felony.

3. A federal law making blow jobs (i.e., sodomy) a felony, even for married couples in the privacy of their own homes.

We can then move on from there later. I’m quite serious. The next time the fundies want an amendment “protecting” marriage, we ought to give it to them. Stop debating gay marriage. Let’s REALLY talk about marriage. Let’s get the fundies to admit what their REAL agenda is. Ask them to make their marriage amendment broader to include all of the above.

I did this a year ago when I was sitting in for Mike Signorile on Sirius radio. I was interviewing a lawyer with the American Family Association. I got him to admit, on the air, that if he were a state legislator he would vote to ban all sodomy, even between consenting married heterosexual adults in their own bedrooms (and he specifically included blow jobs, when I asked him about it). I wanted to make the entire debate on gay marriage this year about blow jobs and the religious right wanting to ban them.

Then there’s masturbation.

Did you realize that last year when Justice Scalia dissented in the Lawrence v. Texas decision, the one that overturned ant-gay sodomy laws, he angrily included a long list of things that the state would no longer be able to regulate as a result of the Lawrence decision – i.e., things that Scalia and his religious right ilk WANT to be able to regulate:

State laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity are likewise sustainable only in light of Bowers’ validation of laws based on moral choices. Every single one of these laws is called into question by today’s decision; the Court makes no effort to cabin the scope of its decision to exclude them from its holding.

That’s who we’re up against, folks. People who want the power to regulate masturbation.

Again, I cannot believe that no one made an issue of this last year. This would have been my number one talking point. And we should add that to the list of new state laws and state constitutional amendments we propose – regulating masturbation. Could you imagine your local politicians having to answer questions about masturbation at their press conferences, all because THEY started this debate? How about writing letters to the editor about it, and letters to your member of Congress? Tell me that wouldn’t be a hoot.

The religious right activists are absolute nut jobs. And the American people would freak if they saw how utterly evil and stupid religious right activists really are. It’s time we showed them. I’m not sure any organized political group at the federal level has the cojones to grab on to something like this, but perhaps some local activists can in their own state. Hell, form your own pro-family group and start your own campaign to defend marriage, while pushing the agenda I’ve outlined above. What would the fundies do? Oppose you? Not likely, when it’s what they actually believe. And in the end, they’d be exposed as the extremist wack jobs they really are.

John AravosisFollow me on Twitter: @aravosis | @americablog | @americabloggay | Facebook | Google+ | LinkedIn. John Aravosis is the former editor of AMERICAblog, which he founded in 2004. He has a joint law degree (JD) and masters in Foreign Service from Georgetown (1989); and worked in the US Senate, World Bank, Children's Defense Fund, and as a stringer for the Economist. Frequent TV pundit: O'Reilly Factor, Hardball, World News Tonight, Nightline & Reliable Sources. Bio, article archive.